IF there is one country on earth where the cry “Death to England” still
carries weight — where people still harbor the white-hot hatred of
British colonialism that once inflamed millions from South Africa to
China — that country would be Iran. And that is what the leaders of Iran
must have been counting on when screaming militiamen, unhindered by the
police, poured into the British Embassy in Tehran to vandalize it on
Tuesday.

Most Iranians, like most people anywhere, would deplore the idea of
thugs storming into a foreign embassy. Nonetheless, some may have felt a
flicker of satisfaction. Even an outrage like this, they might have
said, is a trifle compared with the generations of torment Britain
inflicted on their country.

So Iran’s mullahs — they, not President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, are
reported to have been behind the attack — were not gambling in ordering,
or at least tolerating, it. They presumably realized that the world
would denounce their flagrant violation of international law. But they
also knew it would resonate with the narrative Iranians have heard for
so long about their own history.